Closing The Divide, 19

There is no silver bullet, no magic wand, no secret incantation that is going to cure us of our social and economic inequality. The one thing that needs to change the most, is least likely to change: this is our own selfish arrogance and our greed. There was the barmy hope in some quarters that greater wealth would help close the divide as we all share in the largess of economic prosperity, but the opposite is occurring. The greedy minority is hoarding and amassing all the more wealth to themselves and the rest of us end up with nothing. This could be from not having enough but from excess, from having too much. So we have monster mansions and luxury condos being built all over my city, and they are largely going to offshore ownership, and the wealth gets siphoned away from the quarters where it is already most lacking. Our governments are finally addressing this crisis of foreign greed, but it really seems like too little too late. I have never been wealthy. In fact, ever since my parents divorced in my early teens my life has been marked by chronic poverty and struggle. There are others like me. For whatever reasons we have never been able to improve our lives in the material sense, I think that a lot of us share certain characteristics in common: 1. bad luck; 2. poor timing; 3. lack of supportive connections; 4. lack of resources. 5. not being competitive. I'm sure there are lots of other variables, but these five will suffice. I had the bad luck of having two very selfish parents who wanted to put their own interests ahead of their children. I didn't share my brother's competitive personality, and this placed me at a huge disadvantage. I was also younger and more vulnerable. In grade twelve, when most high school students should be able to start planning for their post-secondary education and ultimately, how they are going to map out their adult lives, I was coping with a father who hated me so intensely and irrationally that I was kicked out of his home for the simple reason that he did not want me under his roof, and ended up in a small town with my mother and her boyfriend, and I ended up wasting a lot of energy there trying to protect her from getting beat up by him. Great way to launch your son's future, Mom and Dad. My mediocre academic performance (family stress made it difficult to focus on schoolwork) and lack of funds made post-secondary education a pipedream, so my only recourse was to move out on my own upon finishing high school and find whatever survival work I could in Vancouver, while coping with living arrangements shared with highly dysfunctional idiots. I worked, survived, found my way around, but after several years, I could muster but three semesters of community college before the need of paying the rent on time cancelled all other priorities. There was no one around to mentor or help me get into decently paid employment. Where were they? I don't know, but I was too chronically exhausted from simply coping year after year to know where to find them, and usually too tired and broke from low-paid employment and having to live on my own to be able to fund my way through night classes. I am not complaining by the way, just explaining what happened, especially for those of you who tend to judge others for not being able to measure up to your standard. I am not alone in my experience. There are many of us around, the working poor, and we are not all losers. However, our governments, and our Canadian culture, such as it is, tends to still be very conservative in many ways. There is nothing wrong with rewarding hard work, but on the other hand, there are lots of working poor who never get ahead and all for the five reasons I have already stated. What alone has helped keep me afloat has been faith and optimism, and a strong belief in non-material values. And this is what I am offering in this series, Gentle Reader: that along with working at ways of redistributing the wealth in ways that will work for everybody, that we also really start to examine and question the kind of materialism that marks us as shallow and selfish. Yes, we all deserve to share in the wealth. We also badly need to reconsider and remodel our lives and our notion of what it means to be human, especially if we are going to find our way out of this growingly unequal morass that global capitalism has thrown us into.